Imagining Canada’s Future
SSHRC’s Imagining Canada’s Future (ICF) initiative mobilizes social sciences and humanities research and talent to address future and emerging societal challenges for Canada and help guide decision-making across all sectors, toward a better future.
What is Imagining Canada’s Future?
Future Challenge Areas
SSHRC focuses its knowledge mobilization efforts on a set of diverse topics associated with the global challenges identified in its 2018 horizon scan and 2012 extensive foresight exercise. It does so through stakeholder engagement activities, and two types of targeted funding opportunities: Knowledge Synthesis Grants, and Ideas Lab Grants.
Further, researchers applying for funding through any SSHRC funding opportunities may, in their research proposals, wish to address one or more of these 16 global challenges impacting Canada and the world.
- Working in the Digital Economy
- Global Health and Wellness for the 21st Century
- The Emerging Asocial Society
- Shifting Dynamics of Privilege and Marginalization
- Building Better Lives Across the Gender Spectrum
- Inhabiting Challenging Environments
- Balancing Risks and Benefits in the Emerging Surveillance Society
- Humanity+
- The Evolving Bio-Age
- Living Within the Earth’s Carrying Capacity
- The Pervasive Contamination of the ‘Natural’
- Envisioning Governance Systems that Work
- The Changing Nature of Security and Conflict
- Truth Under Fire in a Post-fact World
- The Arts Transformed
- Evolving Narratives of Cultures and Histories
Action Plan 2025-27
Funding opportunities will be launched under Action Plan 2025-27 to address three of the remaining future challenges.
- The Arts Transformed (2025)
- The Changing Nature of Security and Conflict (2026)
- Truth under Fire in a Post-Fact World (2027)
How can you contribute to Canada’s future?
Applying for funding
Knowledge Synthesis Grants
Apply to SSHRC’s Knowledge Synthesis Grants funding opportunities to address future challenges.
Ideas Lab
The ICF Ideas Lab is an exciting, two-year pilot funding opportunity designed to encourage innovative research partnerships and projects.
Collaborating with researchers
SSHRC invites leaders from the public, private and not-for-profit sectors to consider whether one or more global challenges might offer collaboration opportunities.
To connect your organization, department, or business with SSHRC-funded research experts from across Canada, see SSHRC’s Awards Search Engine.
Partnering with SSHRC
SSHRC collaborates with national or international agencies, government departments and organizations across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors to help advance strategic objectives through joint initiatives. For information on collaborating with SSHRC in a Future Challenge Area, contact the Future Challenges Division
Using evidence briefs
Knowledge Synthesis Grant holders produce two-page briefs to summarize their findings and highlight the policy relevance of their projects. These briefs mobilize research, help inform best practices, and help researchers effectively share information with policy-makers and potential partners in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors.
Features
The future of knowledge mobilization
SSHRC has partnered with the Canadian Commission for UNESCO and its Network of UNESCO Chairs, and Research Impact Canada, to examine promising practices in knowledge mobilization, inclusive knowledge dissemination, and knowledge engagement. Thought leadership papers address how knowledge mobilization can help confront formidable future challenges, and how Canadian research institutions’ active engagement in these practices can support research impact in Canada and the world.
Imagining the future of Knowledge Mobilization - PDF (12.2 MB)